While we were in the middle of all our planning we stopped for a moment mid-summer to host the McDonald Family BBQ. Tim’s sister Kathy was in town so we used that as our opportunity to get everyone together! The kids played in the creek, we all sat on the “deck” and everyone got in some good fishing time. Everyone knows those McDonald boys love to fish, but Billy caught his fair share too!
Yep that’s from our creek!
At this point we were still on the path of adding a large new section to the house. We had our wonderful architect Jack White drawing up plans and were working on some bids. Tim and I hadn’t fully embraced the downsize idea. Sure in theory it sounded good, but every time we started drawing the house kept getting bigger. So while our Secrest Ct. house at 7200 square feet was a behemoth, the new one was only pared down to 4900. Technically not a downsized retirement home at all!
As the numbers to redo the old section of house came in, and the numbers for the whole new section came in, we realized we were totally out of our budget! It wasn’t pretty! We really had to step back and reconsider our options. Do we scrape and build small but totally new? Do we just adjust the old house? We were pretty disappointed after we put together such a cool plan. And, we had wasted money and time on a plan we weren’t going to build! I think that’s when fate intervened to help drive us towards the right decision! Our house on Secrest went under contract!
Our House 
Can’t wait to see the final plans!! Hopefully you’ll be posting some idea of them for those of us that aren’t right down the street anymore?
I would love to hear about the final plan as well. Can’t wait to see pictures too!! 🙂